The Man Who Shot the West

By Richard Schickel

Published: January 9, 2000

PRINT THE LEGEND

The Life and Times of John Ford.

By Scott Eyman.

Illustrated. 656 pp. New York:

Simon & Schuster. $40.

SCOTT EYMAN'S title is borrowed from the most famous line in the John Ford canon: ''When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.'' It occurs in ''The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance'' (1962), and it refers to the question of who actually plugged the eponymous psychopath, thus permitting civilization to take root in the rude little Western town called Shinbone. The world believes it was Ransom Stoddard, a pacifistic tenderfoot at the time, and has rewarded him with a distinguished political career -- governor, senator, ambassador. He knows that the deed was actually done by his friend Tom Doniphon, who has subsequently slipped into poverty, anonymity and drunkenness, but whose funeral Stoddard has returned to attend. It is Stoddard's desire belatedly to set the record straight that elicits from a newspaper editor Ford's signature demurral.

The movie is elegiac, not to say lugubrious, about what it sees as the continuing necessity for lies that save, but still it believes in their usefulness. As Eyman says, ''If society is to benefit from someone's sacrifice, legend must take precedence over truth.''

That's a point more arguable than it seems to Eyman, both in particular and in general. The movie is unclear about how exactly Stoddard's career made this desert bloom, why he's particularly entitled to his legend. As for the generality, Eyman elsewhere quotes Ford that ''it's good for the country to have heroes to look up to,'' even if they are false ones. He adds this gloss: ''Ford says that the lies are necessary . . . because the important thing is that the greatest good happens for the greatest number.'' Just how this kind of mythomania can, over history's long run, create a good society is the premise that ''Print the Legend'' utterly refuses to examine.

Basically, hero worship -- like Tom Joad, he's all around us in the dark,'' the book breathlessly concludes -- and a belief that we have a continuing need to see Ford as an American legend are what Eyman has for a point of view. It is not, putting it gently, the most fruitful or subtle approach to this life -- particularly since it often leads Eyman to willfully ignore or, at best, blithely brush past his own frequently impressive research, and to ignore the obvious and disturbing links between the director's personality and his work.

John Ford (1894-1973) was not a nice person. He was an alcoholic, given to epic binges. He was also a director who delighted in cruelly, publicly humiliating his casts and crews, a man who carried petty grudges for punishing decades and someone whose withdrawals and silences profoundly damaged his family. ''Vicious,'' ''mean,'' ''a bully,'' ''a tyrant'' -- words like these accreted around Ford, employed even by people who succumbed to his occasional (and, to me, entirely elusive) charm. He was, as Eyman puts it (without following up on the thought), ''at ease'' with only one kind of relationship, ''the harsh but loving father and an eager-to-learn son-supplicant.''

Eyman, the author of a biography of Ernst Lubitsch, is forthright, often painfully detailed, in his descriptions of Ford's many descents into inexcusability. But he persistently misunderstands these ugly anecdotes. To him, they are evidence of forgivably curmudgeonly eccentricity. I think they represent a defect of character, the evasion of which consistently and deeply damaged Ford's work.

Take, for example, ''The Searchers'' (1956). For Eyman (like just about everyone these days), it is Ford's masterpiece, and there is much to admire about this tale of a frontiersman's obsessive, seven-year search for his niece, abducted by Comanche raiders: John Wayne's raging, towering performance as Ethan Edwards; Ford's strong imagery; a potent theme -- the violent racism endemic to America's westering saga. For Ethan does not intend to rescue his niece, he intends (until the last minute) to kill her for becoming a hostile chief's squaw.

But this is a spoiled masterpiece. Partly that's because Edwards's companion through the years is a young half-breed (played by Jeffrey Hunter), whom he habitually calls ''blankethead'' and always treats contemptuously; partly it is because the younger man is given an Indian ''bride,'' who is chubby, sexually obsessed and the object of Ford's tasteless ridicule; partly it is because whenever the searchers return to civilization they confront a stupefying subplot about Hunter's long-postponed marriage, which features one of those endless, pointless brawls that Ford alone seems to have found amusing.

Flaws of this kind achieved their apotheosis in ''The Quiet Man'' (1952), which won Ford the last of his six Academy Awards and Eyman's praise as a ''benevolent masterpiece.'' Buried inside it there is, as some critics have noted, a parable about a woman's need to assert and assure her independence that is particularly brave in the film's context -- tradition-bound Ireland of the 1920's. But that idea is swamped by the movie's shameless Irishry: comic drunkenness, another epic brawl and the brutalization of its heroine, Maureen O'Hara, played for laughs. Indeed, all of Irish life is viewed with a cunning, sentimental twinkle in the eye. Far from being the genial travelogue Ford thought it was, it is among the most witless and vulgar movies ever made by a supposedly major director.